Google’s March to World Domination, Part II

As noted in the Times earlier this week, Google users can now search deep into content sites without leaving Google, bypassing publishers' own search functions entirely. Publishers, contemplating the resulting page view migration from their sites to Google, have reacted negatively and some have asked Google to stop providing the extra search box underneath the results for their site.

Here how it works: I'm looking for an article I saw recently in Scientific American on particle physics so I google "SciAm." The first search result contains a search box incorporated with the SciAm.com links, so I type in "particle physics" there and get a page of relevant results from just SciAm. I see my article on click on it. Voila! Google creates one additional page view for Google (the second search results page) and at least two fewer for SciAm (their home page and their own search results page).

To most publishers, this probably seems like piling on. Google is already probably your number one source of external traffic. They may also be your fallback ad network, selling inventory on your site to blue chip advertisers and keeping most of the revenue. You don't want to antagonize them, for fear of losing your hard-won SEO gains (I'm getting a little skittish even writing this post).

This latest move highlights the strategic necessity of growing organic traffic and internal sales ability, reducing your Google dependency. A good role model is ESPN who announced this week that they are ditching ad networks entirely. Google may be "doing no evil" to your business, but they're not interested in giving you any help.

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By Henry Donahue -- Henry Donahue is the CEO of Discover Media LLC, the publisher of DISCOVER magazine and discovermagazine.com. Prior to leading Discover, Henry was the Group CFO of Primedia's Lifestyles Magazine Group, a 30+ magazine division, which included the company’s Soap Opera, Crafts, Boating, Equine and History titles.

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Perhaps I'm missing something

Submitted by Rex Hammock on Thu, 03/27/2008 - 20:42.

Let me get this straight. Helping readers get precisely to the content they are looking for on you website is penalizing the publisher because it doesn't generate page views? This is the problem with using page-views as a metric, not a problem with what Google is doing. Using this logic, magazines should remove table of contents from their magazines so that readers would have to flip through the entire magazine to discover the stories they may want to read -- because doing so would make them have to look at more ads.

You're right on from the reader's perspective

Submitted by Henry Donahue on Fri, 03/28/2008 - 18:38.

You're not missing anything from the reader's perspective. They may get directly to the piece of content they're looking for in fewer clicks. The point is more that publishers need to work to reclaim some of the balance of power - building their organic traffic and ad sales capabilities - so they're not increasingly reliant on a single giant partner.

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